harddrive speeds, cd images.

i plan to burn the cd images games on my sager np2090 harddrive. games like gears of war, starcraft II and such so i don't have to worry about keeping track of the cd.

would having a 5400rpm hd over a 7200rpm have any ill effects from playing games straight from cd images from your harddrive? im not talking about slow load times, ofcourse the 7200rpm drive will help there. im talking bout game performance, fps, quality
how do 5400rpm or 7200rpm drives compare to cd drive speeds?

any help would be greatly appreciated =)

 

I did this with my Alienware (until it killed my hard drive space) for a VERY long time because the CD/DVD drive would act funky and not work with the CD properly sometimes.

The speed of your hard drive should have very little impact on your performance. All your computer needs is to "see" the CD (image) to verify that you aren't running some sort of pirated version of the game. Its not generally pulling data off of the CD (image) at all, just checking to make sure you have it.

So the computer will look at the CD image, verify that you have your "CD" in the tray (it will see the image and think its the CD), and start the rest of the program from the installed portion on your hard drive. It will very rarely access the image unless it is doing another check to verify the CD (image) is still there. Modern games install almost everything they need to run onto your hard drive.

As I said, I used to do this too, but it starts to feel like such a waste of hard drive space when you need about a 1GB image just so you don't have to keep swapping in that WC3 disk and the computer isn't even using it for data, just a simple (smaller than one megabyte) portion of the image!

 

StormEffect spelled it out. Only a couple of thoughts. If you are going to use all this space for image make sure you do the minimum install (if that still even is an option in games) to save HDD space. Remember all HDD's are faster than CD/DVD drives so if CD is fast enough HDD is more than fast enough. When I used to play Need For Speed “Porches Unleashed” I downloaded a file a couple of KB and placed it in the game folder. Game would play w/out CD. You can find these on the Internet. Is it legal I don't know but if you bought it, morally I think OK. If you find one of these files you may be able to modify with your key's to work for all games, not the same file but one for each game. They are basically txt files

 

Yeah, games hardly ever actually read from the CD/DVD during gameplay. They just test that the cd is there, and that it can pass copy protection. (so you might have a bit of trouble getting some games to run off images... Can be done though )

But in any case, even the slowest harddrive is a lot faster than a CD/DVD drive, so no worries about performance.

 

The best (easiest) way is to use a program to mount the iso as an image. I use DiskInDisk and it works great. All you have to do is make an iso of the game disk and then run DID and tell it to mount the image.

http://www.discindisk.cn/

 

Thanks everyone, i really appreciate all your helpful comments.
since i seem to have such good luck here...one more question

do you think the heat produced from a 7200rpm drive will affect the gpu temperatures at all? i plan to OC my 8600gt in my sager np2090.

 

Not in so far as compared to any other HDD, I think your GPU is more likely to effect your HDD if anything. But I would not worry, just pay attention to temps to be sure. Also your HDD will not be running much (sorry that is not true, oops).

 

thanks baddogboxer and everyone again =)
and after doing some research, the 160gb seagate momentus 7200.2 hd is quite amazing. runs cooler temperatures and better battery performance than its 5400 rpm counterparts. nice xD

 

Here is a link to No-CD patches, could save you a lot of space on your hard drive. I have not done this in years looks like now they are programs that use Windows installer, old days small drag and drop txt.

http://www.gameburnworld.com/